The Soulpass Project

The Canon PowerShot SX100IS is a good digital camera. A few years ago I had a PowerShot A60 — definitely money well-spent, loved the heck out of it. Unfortunately the construction of the A60 was crap and it ended up breaking, but it was a trooper while it lasted. At one point Canon did put out a CCD Image Sensor Advisory Service Notice, and fixed the problem out of warranty along with fixing a faulty review button! This was free, and it was years out of warranty! So I think that speaks volumes about the company’s customer service.

Back to the PowerShot SX100IS. While it’s not suitable for professional work, it does a fine job at point-and-shoot, and it goes fully manual: The ISO speed, aperture, shutter speed, flash output, white balance, and many other manual controls can be adjusted.

Low-light conditions may prove to be an obstacle with this one. While it is possible to take the ISO speed to 1600, it’s practically pointless. There will so much noise that the picture will likely be useless.

One interesting feature that’s more of a novelty for me is the face recognition. The thing can actually spot people’s faces! While I’ll probably never use this in practice, it’s just neat!

UPDATE: Some reviews on the web say that the SX100 has a really bad video capturing system. I disagree; there is a “low quality” mode that uses a high compression suitable for email. Using that setting your video will be of poor quality. It can do higher resolution and it does a decent job. It is true that you can hear the zoom motor while capturing video. It’s not that loud, and if you’re recording something loud such as a concert, it shouldn’t be a problem. Keep in mind that this is not a digital video camera anyway, it’s a point-and-shoot, and it does a good job with what it’s designed to do.

Tip: I think that the Night Snapshot mode works fairly well indoors with no flash if the room has ample lighting.

Tip #2: “Dragging the shutter.” While in Program (P) mode or Aperture Priority (Av) mode, if you press the Menu button and scroll through the options on the first page, you’ll notice one called “Slow Synchro.” That creates really interesting effects. With the flash open and on in those modes, the shutter will remain open shortly after the flash goes off. In low-light situations this helps to illuminate the subject (through the flash) while also bringing light to the background (through the shutter delay). Camera shake will cause the background to blur significantly.

Disco ball + 2s exposure + mild wave effect + textured “airbrush” =

click to enlarge

Couldn’t do much about the vent on the ceiling, or my broken camera leaving horizontal blemishes.

Here’s the original.

Last week we added color to the art… Behold!

Click on the image to enlarge.

Here’s one from a few weeks ago, and I still have the one from last week to put up here!

Click on the image to enlarge.

Billy came up with a name for the way we do Trivia Night art! Rick, Billy, Amy, and I went to Trivia Night at the Wing Shack last night, and we made another drawing… Behold:

Click the image to see the whole thing in all its glory.

So Charlie, Billy, Rick, and myself went to the Wing Shack tonight for “Trivia Night”. Chris Tobey and Ben Titus were playing music there when we got there (a pleasant surprise). When we got there we saw Brooke (since Chris was there) and she sat with us during the music and through the trivia. We didn’t win, but Billy and I worked on a pretty sweet drawing on the back of a beer advertisement. Billy did most of it, and I added a few things here and there. After a while it became obvious that it must be scanned and put online. With no further ado, I present to you — Trivia Night scribbling!

Click the image to see the whole thing in all its glory.

UPDATE: Exhibit is back!! I say, Exhibit is the best image manager for WordPress. It may not have been what I needed for a “photo gallery,” per se, but I now realize it is what I’m looking for in image posting. FYI, if you want to get Exhibit to work in PHP-CGI mode, the process is outlined in a comment in the Dreamhost Knowledge Base:

In exhibit10.php, there is a block of code near the very beginning (line 46) that says:

$_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME']=
...
$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);

Remove that whole block and replace it with:

$_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'] = $_SERVER['SCRIPT_URL'];

I’ve uploaded a few photos that I’ve taken in the past, as I’m working on finding a good efficient way to embed images into WordPress posts. These were done with the aid of IImage Browser, but I really don’t like how it works. I’d say it could stand to undergo a lot of improvement. For example, dynamically generated thumbnails when searching for an image to embed rather than full-size images. Also, the option to always use dynamic thumbnails, or a better way to store the static ones.

One of a few projects I did for an art class at SVCC:

During a hospital stay, I drew this on the back of a paper titled “Patient Rights and Responsibilities”: